1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a playback apparatus and a playback method of a record medium such as a disk.
2. Description of the Related Art
A record medium playback apparatus for playing back program information such as music data, recorded on a record medium such as a disk in a related art starts playback simply at the playback position when the power of the playback apparatus is turned on. For example, if the power of the playback apparatus is turned off while program information recorded on a record medium is being played back, and is again turned on, the playback apparatus restarts playback of the program information at the playback position at which the pickup was positioned when the power was turned off.
Thus, condition called “playback with the beginning part skipped” that program information is played back as the beginning of the program information is skipped or condition called “playback with the last part remaining” that only the termination part of program information is played back occurs depending on the playback start position.
That is, playing back the program information is started with the skipped introduction part of the program information or if the program information ends with a fade-out, playing back the program information is started at the fade-out part; the event maybe offensive to the user.
To solve the problem, for example, as shown in JP-A-4-037495, whether the playback position at which the pickup is positioned when the power of a record medium playback apparatus was turned on is in the first or latter half of program information is determined and if the playback position is in the first half, playing back the program information is started at the beginning position; if the playback position is in the latter half, playing back is started at the beginning position of program information next to that program information.
The art described in JP-A-4-037495 can effectively eliminate the condition of “playback with the beginning part skipped” and the condition of “playback with the last part remaining,” however, similar processing is performed regardless of the length of the record time of program information and therefore it is not always preferable method to playback for a user.
For example, as for program information with record time TTm being extremely long, as shown in FIG. 3, if the playback position at which the pickup was positioned when the power of the record medium playback apparatus was turned off is slightly leaning to the termination position (indicated by B in FIG. 3) from the half of the record time of the whole program information (indicated by A in FIG. 3), playing back is started at the beginning position of program information next to that program information.
In doing so, even when the remaining record time indicated by T2 in FIG. 3 is substantially long, the portion corresponding to T2 will be skipped. Therefore, it is not always preferable method to playback for a user.